Carrefour Buys Wellcome Taiwan from Dairy Farm for €97M

Carrefour has snapped up Wellcome Taiwan

Food leads Mingtiandi’s roundup of Asia real estate headlines today as a European hypermarket giant buys a set of grocery stores in Taiwan of from a unit of Hong Kong’s Jardine’s for €97 million ($109 million).

In other news around the region, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund is said to be in talks to buy a stake in the world’s largest privately owned self-storage company, and landlords are lowering rents for Hong Kong micro-flats as the recession begins to bite. Elsewhere, a Japanese hotelier is setting up a $180 million fund to buy up distressed hotels in Japan.

Carrefour Buys Wellcome Taiwan from Dairy Farm for €97M

Carrefour has agreed to purchase local grocery chain Wellcome Taiwan, making it the second biggest food retailer to operate various-sized stores in that market.

The purchase of 224 small, local stores and a warehouse from Dairy Farm comes as retailers across the spectrum train their focus on Asia while business remains subdued in the Europe and the Americas. Read more>>

GIC in Talks to Buy StorageMart Stake

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC is in talks to acquire a stake in StorageMart, which describes itself as the largest privately owned storage company in the world, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Although a deal has yet to be finalised, the potential transaction is slated to value StorageMart at more than $2.5 billion, including debt, some of the people said. Rosewood Investment may participate in the deal, one of them said. Read more>>

China Takes First Steps Toward Launching $3T REIT Market

For the longest time, the only way to get exposure to China’s real estate market, for mom and pop investors at least, was to buy a house. That’s all set to change with the advent of real estate investment trusts.

China kicked off a REIT trial in late April that will initially focus around pooling capital to fund infrastructure projects like highways and airports. If successful, the program may be expanded to include traditional real estate, exposing individual investors to a market Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates could one day be worth as much as $3 trillion. Read more>>

Jho Low’s New York Penthouse Sold by US Department of Justice

A luxury penthouse belonging to fugitive businessman Jho Low in Manhattan, New York, has been sold as part of a US forfeiture case against the financier.

The value of the transaction, which took place on Friday (29 May), has yet to be disclosed. The asking price for the property was last quoted at $30 million. Read more>>

Hong Kong Landlords Lower Rents as Recession Bites

Rents on tiny flats in some of Hong Kong’s chic property developments are sliding towards the rates on the city’s notorious subdivided flats as landlords concede more ground in a recession-hit economy, according to property agents.

At least 10 such projects completed in recent few years have had flats leased out at or below HK$10,000 ($1,290) a month since the beginning of this year, as rising unemployment and campus closures hurt demand for housing from young professionals and foreign students. Read more>>

Homebuyers Grab 99% of Flats on Offer at Vanke Hong Kong Project

Vanke Holdings (HK) on Tuesday repeated the success of its first batch of sales at its The Campton residential development in Cheung Sha Wan, nearly selling all its flats on offer, continuing a strong uptick in home sales seen last month.

The developer sold 93 out of 94 flats in the project as of 5:30pm. Some 7,000 registrations of intent were received for the second batch or 74 buyers for each flat. Last Wednesday it sold all 188 flats in the first batch, with 47 first-time buyers competing for each unit. Read more>>

Japanese Resort Firm to Set Up JPY 20B Fund to Buy Distressed Hotels

Japan’s Hoshino Resorts, operator of Hoshinoya luxury hotels, is seeking opportunities to revive hotels hit by the coronavirus outbreak and a delay in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

The hotelier has partnered investor Risa Partners Inc which will establish a fund of as much as JPY 20 billion ($180 million) to be invested in hotels seeking new ownership, the pair said last week. Read more>>

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